The Problem Is You

Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

Maybe it’s not The Man. Maybe it’s not the system. Or your deadbeat dad. Or the stuck-up bitches you went to high school with. Or the bank. Or the Kardashians. Or microwave radiation. Maybe the problem really is you.

No one wants to face that. Everyone wants to be unique, but not so unique that you’ll be forced to admit that you are problem. So your life sucks on all fronts, but when you compare each of the situations, the only thing they have in common is that you’re smack dab in the middle of them. You with your impatience, your timidity, your pessimism, your impulsiveness, your ego, your self-blaming ways.  It’s a hard and humbling realization to come to. Maybe you haven’t caused your current predicament, but your actions and thought processes have surely encouraged/nurtured/sustained/supported it.  Things fell apart, but you didn’t bother to put them back together. You just grabbed the next toy off the shelf and were surprised when it eventually broke, too. But there comes a time when you have to look at the patterns, crunch the numbers, draw some #$%^@ Venn diagrams and confront the possibility that the one thing out of all the crappy things that you have direct and enduring control over is you.

Maybe the next time you throw out the old “It’s not you, it’s me” excuse, you’ll spare a moment to consider that it might have more truth to it than you think.